The present disclosure relates to technology for, among other things, providing intelligent item tracking and expedited item reordering by stakeholders.
The use of beacons in retail and e-commerce is dramatically changing the shopping experience for users. In the past, users frequenting retail establishments browsed through merchandise placed on the sales floor. In some cases, a customer would select an item for purchase only to then find out from the staff that the item is out of stock or not available in his or her size. As a result, the customer would leave the establishment frustrated with little recourse other than to return to the establishment of a later time or visit a competitor.
More recently, however, some retailers have begun installing beacons in their brick-and-mortar stores that are capable of identifying the customers entering the stores and pushing real-time notifications to the mobile devices of those customers to incentivize those customers to purchase items that are in-stock and/or on promotion during their visits. In addition, beacons are sometimes placed adjacent to certain products and when the users browse those products (e.g., a rack of shirts or pants), a retailer's information system may perform actions, such as push personalized offers related to those specific products to customers' mobile devices or track the time the customers dwell near items (which could reflect a higher degree of interest in those items or that a customer is showrooming the items) and adapt the offers accordingly.
However, the above embodiments are based on a physical stores in which the retailers have control and are not amenable to home or office environments where individuals or businesses order products online. For instance, a facilities manager may be in charge of stocking and reordering office and food supplies for a company (e.g., for the supply room, pantry, etc.). The facilities manager may use manual methods to keep track of products to restock. This process is inefficient and often leads to items being out of stock.
More sophisticated inventory management systems tag each and every items in inventory with radio frequency tags. Each tag emits a unique signal for the specific item it is attached to. That tag is registered with the management system so the management system can automatically determine which items are within a certain area based the signal emitted by that tag. This allows users to identify the specific location of each item and track whether any items have been removed. However, these systems are extremely expensive and therefore typically only amenable to larger warehouses that have millions of items that need to be warehoused and tracked because the scale of these systems justifies the cost of the inventory management systems.
What is needed is an affordable for stocking and quickly reordering items that is easy for users, such as small businesses, to maintain and setup, and that does not require those users to undergo expensive training or maintain costly information technology infrastructure.